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siliconbits writes "As we get closer to — and hear more about — the launch of Google's upcoming social product, Google Me, the less and less it seems like a stand-alone social network and more like an interweaving of social connections into its existing offerings. It sounds eerily similar to those 'social' search results that have lingered at the bottom of the results page and third-party extras like Rapportive, the Gmail add-on that gives you the social networking lowdown on your email contacts."

It's a fundamental aspect of human culture and psychology... for normal people, at least. Its just there used to be places you could go that everyone in the world couldn't follow you and find out everything you were doing.

Its just there used to be places you could go that everyone in the world couldn't follow you and find out everything you were doing.

The Internet is not and was not necessarily that place ("On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" notwithstanding). The reason everybody can follow you and find out everything you're doing everywhere else in the world is because you announced to everybody where you were going and what you were doing anyway.

The reason everybody can follow you and find out everything you're doing everywhere else in the world is because you announced to everybody where you were going and what you were doing anyway.

Yes, but not on purpose, willingly or even that most people know of. Cookies, IP tracing, login linking and what not.

That is also the reason why I and many others do not use their real name. However many people do not have the knowledge to make that decision. On the Internet nobody is paranoia, because your ARE being f

I can't follow you outside slashdot unless YOU make that possible. I don't know who you are. I can search your posts by your username because YOU choose to create an account and post under that account. I can't see what posts you made as an AC. Or what moderations you have done.

All your actions outside posts made under your account are unknown to me, unless YOU somehow share them AND link them to this account. You could be Obama for all I know, or be Lady Gaga. Now, I could google your nickname, but that only works if you used the same nick somewhere else.

It is possible to analyse all your posts and from them deduce a profile based on your style of writing. To be fair for the average slashdot poster that would put their location as "nearest kindergarden" but it might be possible to trace you to a specific location.

BUT that is because YOU choose to link all your posts together.

On the other hand, in the real world, I can't go invisible when I leave my house. So my neighbours know when I come and when I go. The supermarket can tell what I am doing by what I am buying. The bookshop knows my reading habbits (you sicko, is their personalized greeting) etc etc.

So, why do people worry about their online visibitlity where you can be a million different people, when everyone and their dog knows your offline person and what it is doing?

If you ever lived in a small community, you are used to it and you know, if the community is good, then it is a benefit. Neighbours actually stopped an attempted burglary because they knew I was away and saw movement so knew it couldn't be okay when I was younger and lived in a "village" that was about a dozen houses. In Amsterdam I had a neighbour discovered after the smell from the rotting corpse finally drifted into the hallway. All I knew was that the previous resident had moved and nobody ever noticed the new person moving in.

Don't complain about invasion of privacy is you broadcast every fart you make to the entire world. It is like saying "how dare people look at me when I streak down the high street".

Fair enough, but you have to admit that things start getting sticky when Google tries to pressure you into giving them your cellphone number by using SMS for authentication.

Sure they may already have a rough idea of where I live based on my IP address, heck they may know exactly where I live thanks to the Google maps van that also happened to sniff and store WiFi activity.

They still don't know whether I go to Pizza-Hut or not and they are irritatingly desperate to find out.

And about that small community where everybody knows me. It also means I know them. On Facebook almost everybody puts up their own name and details. Sure I could say "But they did that themselves" and lauch at them for not having the knowledge that it is a bad thing to do.

Even about 10 years ago it was pretty easy to find information about people. e.g. Person makes contact via Yahoo Pager using his own name. We figure out the IP, so we know he is from a University. Searc

No. The internet was designed to keep computers connected during a nuclear war. Everything else was added on later. The web was really for publishing documents and accessing scientific information - it wasn't meant to let everyone know that you're a Justin Bieber fan.

But hey, everything morphs and now the scientists can look at porn while surfing for the latest on particle physics.

The web was originally designed to allow two way data push between agents, human/automated or whatever. The tools to push came later, and so iteration one was just static content, mostly information (data that got compiled); now we have data being published as readily. I'd suggest letting the web know you're a fan is the same sort of data that was originally intended.

Actually, the part that annoys me more about the new "social" intarwebs is all the morons complaining about people knowing they're a Justin Bieber fan after they posted the same on their "marked private" Facebook account. That said, I do hate things like when Google makes GoogleTalk sign-in automatic when you go to Gmail unless you turn the setting off explicitly. They made the same mistake with that stupid Buzz crap. I anticipate with Google that I'll have to opt-out rather than opt-in with this social

The internet was designed to keep computers connected during a nuclear war.

That's a common, but untrue, myth. The Internet was designed to survive large network outages primarily because the early networks were extremely unreliable, not because of any desire to survive nuclear attack. The Internet was primarily designed, and used, for facilitating communication between researchers in far-flung locations. In that aspect, it could be argued that the intention was social in nature from the very beginning, and anonymity wasn't ever really expected or designed for.

Keeping computers connected during a nuclear war serves no benefit in itself. The Internet was designed as a robust communication network. And it has remained to be just that. The amount of users and content of the communication haven't changed that.

Internet was designed, as you said, to withstand nuclear war, but that is not what the internet was "designed" for. It is, it will be, and it will remain a "communication" tool. People who don't realize and understand this are doomed to "not getting it" for a long time.

The people who don't get why social media is so big, don't understand that the internet was social to start with, because it is all about communication. The internet is a social network. The only thing that has changed is the bandwidth, and w

The users have changed. The whole point of improved user interfaces is that the medium is accessible to a greater range of people. There are more people in the world who are interested in their daughters party photos than the contents of github.

I think what the parent is complaining about isn't the social nature of the internet, but how it's become focussed on social frivolities rather than a method of exchanging information. When the www came about everyone thought that this generation of kids would turn out to be the most intelligent in history because information would be easily accessible and free. But the exact opposite is true. Despite the fact that the www hosts more knowledge than any library on earth, most people use it for social network

your-own-domain.tld ?
That's what I like about having my own domain, being able to direct it to whatever I want, and not depending on some other entity that can change the services I'm using whenever they want to.
That and tinkering with all the possibilities a domain + a box plugged to the Internet offers, obviously.:)

imo, giving people more ways to communicate is not a bad thing. i am not claiming it improves the quality of communication, but i don't think anyone is promising that either. people are online, so they want to talk to others who are online. kind of like what we are doing right now.

What I mean is the problem isn't social networking but every commercial interest that jumps on it. Share us on Twitter! Follow us on Facebook! Dig us! Reddit! And it's everywhere and practically replaces actual websites except with more tracking.

Agreed! Why does everything have to be social! To me it's not social, it's INSECURE! When I want to be social I invite friends over, or I actually leave my home.
I don't want my g-mail account to be linked to my google groups profile. Nor do I want my Youtube account to have anything to do with my google search account, which I really don't even want!
I further more don't need the search function integrated in my browser, and I don't need it to simultaneously index my files. I know where I put em - It's

Let's see:On the blue corner we have the king of disregarding users privacy options time after time. The one is standing up to its amoral morals in the face of media outrage and scandals aplenty - Facebook.On the red corner, the newcomer to the social networking scene/ It may have blundered the first time, but it quickly learned from its mistakes and fixed what is wrong within days of users' complaints - Google.

I think I'll go with the one who at least tries to listen to what the users complain about and ch

Let's say you have a friend. One day, he invites you to go camping. You wake in the middle of the night and he's raping your asshole. You beg him to stop and he does, after making you lick the shit off his dick. A couple months later, he asks you to go camping again.

I personaly would gracefully decline, but I know some who would gladly take the offer:)And on a more serious note: If Google breached users' privacy intentionally, then what you said would have been a good anolagy (Although there were no cars in it). However, I believe Google's position that what happened with the launch of Buzz was a honest mistake. They offered the product with some options turned on by default because they thought users would appreciate the fact that it made the product easier to set up

Fully expect this to be in beta for 2 years and then canceled, a la Wave, for some other 'uber' replacement 'product.' Seriously, with so many talented people, Google actually produces relatively very little.

That's actually quite deliberate, as far as I can tell. Google's model is to get something working in front of real users quickly, have it adapt quickly, and, if it doesn't work well enough to be worth the costs of keeping it up, kill it. This lets them get lots of things in front of customers, giving them more chances to get hits (and letting them learn a lot from the flops.)

It also reduces the risks, since things they don't keep plugging on things till

How many times has Google been launching "a social network" (or "social integration")? First there's Orkut (failed), and then FriendFeed and its Blogger integration, and then Google Buzz (major fail!), now this Google Me. Just buy out Facebook (or Zynga, or both) and be done with it.

Orkut a failure? You mention blogger but you fail to mention it's success.Google is trying to build a better social network and they aren't afraid to try different things. Good for them, and ultimately good for us.

Google has their fingers in a lot of pies, I know. But please pull resources from this crap and get some truly useful things workings, like the ability to import an existing phone number into Google Voice! That has been "on the way" for 18 months, and many many people will jump to use it. As it sits now, my GV number is unused and that makes GV mostly unused. If I could put my home/business numbers on GV, usage (and potential data for mining) will skyrocket for me and for a lot of other people disaffect

As much as I want a Facebook killer to come along (and I really, really, really want Facebook to be killed...), I'm not sure I want it to be Google. My big beef with Facebook is I absolutely do not trust them. They've proven to have no respect for my personal information and thus I've pared my profile down to just the bare minimum information and I use the site to stay in touch with friends and family now. I'm not really using the site to keep my friends and family updated on my going-ons, however, because I don't trust Facebook with that information any more. Google, a company which is built on making money from the activities of web browsers, I trust only a bit more. Google, I know, will try to turn a profit from my information but I at least trust Google to make a serious attempt to respect my privacy while they try to monetize my information.

I really want Facebook erased from the digital landscape but I'm not sure if I want Google to be the vanquisher...

Just a question... why do you use Google as a plural noun? I thought corporations were always referred to as singular nouns i.e. "Microsoft is the devil" or "Rolex makes watches", not "Microsoft are the devil" and "Rolex make watches".

Really? I've never noticed that. Interesting. Honestly, they both make sense, since it's a single entity, but by definition is composed of lots of people. Do the Brits do this with all collective entities?

On second thought, American English makes no sense; sports teams are plural, corporations are singular, and the "United States of America" is singular.

Agreed. The ideal scenario is for Google to support the protocols for something like Diaspora so that it plugs in the Google userbase without the Google control. Google's incentive would be reducing facebook's influence in the advertising sphere, naturally.

I don't so much want a Facebook killer, as that just means the sheep have moved on to the next advertising grazing field... I'd much rather people get back to actual social interaction instead of this social facade for the lazy and uninteresting. Instead of facilitating social interaction, Facebook "replaces" it for a large number of people. People get so used to these internet social norms that they don't know how to interact with each other in real life anymore.

Man, you must have sucky friends. Facebook does facilitate actual social interaction for me. Really. I have 20 invites right now for actual things to do outside scheduled for the next week. Now, there are of course other ways to facilitate social interaction that doesn't involve facebook, or really the internet. But, it can be used correctly. So if people don't use it correctly who is to blame, them or the site? I've noticed my anti social friends have finally joined facebook. But they only play the stupid,

Google became popular not only because of their quality search results (which Bing has now, for most practical uses, caught up with), but also because of their minimalist uncluttered search page. Ditto Google mail which not only works well but has a clean UI.

It seems to be the way of most major software applications that they end up adding feature bloat to the point they are no longer unusable for their core purpose, and Google seems intent on going that way too. I guess the Wave fiasco wasn't enough - they

And replaced by something else. In the meantime, Google is jealous that they got a movie made about Facebook, but nobody's rushing to make a movie about Google. Even Apple and Microsoft have have movies 9TV movies anyhow) made about them, so they are feeling left out.

In the mantime, this whole "social networking" thing will die out in about 3 years, that's the general timeframe before everyone gets bored and moves on to something else. I mean, how many time can you post a picture of your cat?

Blogs are already dying out because they oversaturated themselves, it should take Facebook about that much time to oversaturate themselves as well. eBay is dying also as everyone now hates them, Google is now viewed as "evil", let's face it, things change fast in web-time, the WWW has only been around for slightly less than 2 decades (publicly), and one of the first sites here was Yahoo. Does Yahoo make the news every day? No. Nobody gives a crap about Yahoo. They are a dull company. And so it will go with every other internet firm.

Funny that a Pentagon general was lambasted for suggesting the notion, yet a couple internet companies start pushing it as a feature and the public flocks to it. I think I'll start a password storage cloud. Oh wait...

Social sites were called channels.. it wasn't a single entity that controlled everything, it wasn't monetized. It was called IRC.. the difference until mIRC came around was that you had to do everything through a command line.. which for the most part kept the dummies out of my social networks, +++ATH0 took care of the rest.:)